Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) is the electronic exchange of routine business transactions. These transactions include such documents as purchase orders, invoices, inquiries, planning, acknowledgements, pricing, order status, scheduling, test results, shipping and receiving, payments, and financial reporting EDI relies on a standard system that everyone can use, developed under the guidelines of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI), the coordinator for national standards in the United States
Because of its basic strengths, EDI has a lot of advantages

• one-time data entry
  
• reduced errors
  
• on-line data storage
  
• faster management reporting
  
• automatic reconciliation